DLP

A new SharePoint Online feature blocks access to newly uploaded files until Office 365 Data Loss Prevention processes the files to detect policy violations due to the presence of sensitive data. DLP processing for SharePoint Online can take several hours to reach new files, so enabling sensitive by default stops users inadvertently sharing sensitive content until DLP can process files. The downside is that you can't apply sensitive by default to individual sites. It's all or nothing...

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week's SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you're an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

Microsoft Teams supports Office 365 Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, which means that you can check for the sharing of sensitive data like credit card or passport numbers in personal chats or channel conversations. Quite why someone would want to share their credit card number with someone else in a chat is beyond me, but there's no accounting for human taste.

Microsoft has done a good job of helping Office 365 tenants prepare for GDPR, but the best intentions sometimes run into difficulties. Such as what you might find with the new GDPR Data Loss Prevention policy template, which does an excellent job of finding things like European tax numbers... but sometimes too good a job.

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You might be familiar with the DLP policies available in Exchange or SharePoint. These policies work, but they are workload-specific. Microsoft has embarked on a journey to replace them with Unified DLP policies, which provide protection across multiple Office 365 workloads. The new policies are not yet as functional as those available for Exchange, but they will get there.

Tony Redmond explores some things he found out or explored during the week, including a solid DLP roadmap for Office 365, how BMC Remedy creates incident tickets from DLP audit events, that Veeam now offers a backup for Exchange Online, how QUADROtech's ADAM plans to drag public folders into the 21st century, and more.